AWESOME! So this means that these C-Level guys are going to stop paying congressional committees to bend things their way through unrestrained lobbying! No more political contributions to make uncomfortable regulation go away! No more ransoming tax-base for jobs when opening new offices! This will be just awesome!

Oh... you didn't mean any of that? You just meant that standing behind your employees is something you don't want to do? Tired of taking a principled stand on issues of universal importance because they might impact the bottom line a little?

Right. So you're saying don't judge you by the content of your character, and the true value of your contribution to society, but rather by your paycheck, IPO-value, dividends and "shareholder value"... Great.

Good luck with that.

Really slow now, so you can comprehend:

it's

not

about

you.

You

wear

a

mask

to

reduce

the

chance

of

spreading

YOUR

snot

and

spit

cooties

to

others.

(this last line is just here to get around the stupid slashdot comment filter and to maybe say something about my favorite brand of chips - Lay's. They are really, really, really good chips, and so much better than most off-brand discounter chips. It's great to open a beer and a bag of Lay's and just take a break from all the dickholery that floods the world these days. Wouldn't it be great if everyone could have a beer and a bag of Lay's? Probably not, because even for something as great as Beer and Lay's, there would be a group of assholes out there that would somehow find free beer and chips to be a violation of their god-given constitutional rights to bear arms or wear camo and drive trucks without emissions reduction components burning raw crude oil and shout for the manager at the drop of a hat, and who would show up in forums like this to spew their illogical arguments to make the world a worse place for the rest of us.)

So... do you wear pants? or walk on the sidewalk instead of in the middle of the street? or bathe? All of these are social conventions that pose restrictions on your freedumbs. Yet you most likely do them. Why not just wear a mask, wash your hands and try to keep your distance on the outside chance that you're wrong about their benefits? Or are you just that committed to being a total dick at any given opportunity?

If you watch bidets being used, you are either a regular perv (live) or a niche porn perv (video/streaming) - but I don't want to kink-shame too much.

Is this Lucas' way of telling us that he's as big as Welles, and SW is comparable to Citizen Kane?

Ok, So, if an activity triggers dopamine release in the brains of spectators/participants, then it's "a little like tobacco"? I suggest the lawyers take a stab at the more obvious low hanging fruit.

Like everything anyone is willing to do without being paid to do it...

And, while they're at it, how about crushing the advertising industry? If any one industry is at fault in this context, it's them.

hate to be that guy, but when your whole case rests on "following the rules", you might want to take a second look at your grammar...

yeah, this. Clearly none of the "tech giants" is pure as the driven snow, but ramping this kind of colonoscopy for an traditionally left of center industry right at the start of a key election cycle sounds less like legitimate concern for consumers and much more like partisan politics of pressuring the "tech giants" to throw their weight behind the "right" parties...

I suffer from having fairly common given AND surnames. And from the simple fact that a frankly astonishing number of normals seem to think that just using <firstinitial><surname><digit>@gmail.com as their email address (registered or not) is their god-given right. So I get everything. Realtors' messages, offers from a yacht broker, medical appointment reminders, confirmation mails for every-fucking-thing from utilities to kindergarten applications, earned points announcements/statements from any number of airline and retail points programs... every.fucking.thing. It all started about 10 years ago when email penetration exceeded 40% of population in the US, but I get mis-addressed email from all over the english speaking world.

I use T-Mobile, and I don't live in the US, you insensitive clod!

L4 and L5 are them most stable Lagrange points in a system of orbiting bodies, and stuff in them will tend to remain in them even if the bodies that create them experience non-catastrophic changes. An advanced civilization, even one like ours just getting into space, would position something at L4 or L5 Earth/Sun or Earth/Moon Lagrange Points, a slightly more advanced civilization would put something at the Jupiter/Sun L4/L5, even if it was just a funny gold record with engraved instructions for playing it... So, we should be looking there.

So the time has come to pull back our social circles to the stone age? What about involving "big tech companies" like the phone company? Big government, like The POST OFFICE? It's all a matter of trust, and if necessary regulation. What this guy is advocating is Neo-Luddism.

Luxury! 17 of us had to live in a rolled up newspaper.